HAWKSBILL TURTLES

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Coconut Court Beach is home to approx­im­ately 300 nest­ing Hawksbill mar­ine turtles. This num­ber rep­res­ents approx­im­ately one third of the island’s crit­ic­ally endangered spe­cies pop­u­la­tion. The beach is mon­itored by the University of the West Indies Sea Turtle Project volun­teers and the US non-profit group, Earth Watch. The turtles are weighed, tagged for iden­ti­fic­a­tion, their eggs ar coun­ted and the gen­eral health o the animal is ascer­tained. A GPS track­ing sys­tem is deployed on some of the anim­als to doc­u­ment their travels once they return to the ocean. Scientists have col­lec­ted sig­ni­fic­ant amounts of data on the Hawksbill turtle nest­ing pro­cess but little is still known about what they do and where they go once they return to the ocean.

Coconut Court Beach Hotel has suc­cess­fully achieved the enhance­ment of its beach­front for sea turtle nest­ing areas.

The exist­ing harsh flood light­ing on the beach has been removed and replaced by motion sensor light­ing, which will cre­ate a dark, nat­ur­ally lit beach. All the light­ing in the beach front res­taur­ant has been reposi­tioned to give min­imal impact on the beach.

Also Coconut Court Beach Hotel imple­men­ted plant­ing of Goats Foot Yam (Turtle friendly) veget­a­tion.

Turtle hatch­ing sea­son usu­ally runs from mid-July to November.

Comments from a few of our hotel guests who have wit­nessed the long trek to the sea have been pos­it­ive and they were thrilled and very inter­ested in what was being done and taught. This has shown that all our hard work and ini­ti­at­ives do make a dif­fer­ence.

Also see www.barbadosmarinetrust.com

A review and story from one of our Recent Hotel Guests

Palm Tree Shaded Beach with Protected Waters 

The beach was per­fect for us. This isn’t a huge prop­erty but the few hun­dred yard beach-front was palm tree laden with plenty of shade and lounge chairs on most days. This is one of the best beaches we noted dur­ing our stay for com­fort, shade, calm waters with a beach bar and facil­it­ies nearby.

An arti­fi­cial reef was dropped in about sixty feet from shore mak­ing a block of the ocean waves and provid­ing calm waters. Inside the reefs lagoon like set­ting were “reef balls.” These are three foot con­crete formed balls with open holes allow­ing for fish to find pro­tec­tion. This made for an excel­lent place for begin­ner snorkel­ers to learn to appre­ci­ate the anim­als of the sea. My wife and I, avid snorkel­ers, took time to slowly observe the inter­ac­tion of the dif­fer­ent spe­cies of fish within that eco­sys­tem. Low tide is the best time to do this.

Quick story… One morn­ing we noticed yel­low cau­tion tape provid­ing a ten foot circle near the beach edge. Later a worker star­ted dig­ging find­ing a col­lec­tion of nearly 200 sea turtle eggs that were set in the sands by a mother turtle the night before. The Coconut Court people were care­ful to place them in a more secure area. It was an inter­est­ing pro­cess to watch and hope­ful a few of those baby’s will sur­vive their walk to the ocean in some 50 days from now. It was good to see the hotels con­cern for the envir­on­ment and the anim­als that live there.

The beach area was well main­tained with a clean-up per­son there most every day rak­ing palm tree a sea grape leaves and such.